Lots of good news this week! I’ve been nominated for the prestigious Paranormal Romance Guild’s Reviewer’s Choice Award with The Magician’s Curse! This couldn’t come at a better time, since I hope to publish Book Two of the series, “The Great Dagmaru,” in April.

Linda Tonis, senior reviewer for The Paranormal Romance Guild wrote:

I literally read this book in a few hours since I found it hard to put down. This is a story filled with magic, curses, sex, romance, secrets and surprises so how could I not love it.

January 31st is almost at an end here at my house, so I feel I can safely say Just Jot it January 2018 is in the bag. We did it!

Huge congratulations to all of you who managed to post every day. It’s quite the feat! And even if you jotted something down every day but didn’t post it, you still completed the challenge; JusJoJan is all about the writing, not necessarily the blogging.

I’d like to give a special shout out to our kind providers of the Daily Prompts. Your help was much appreciated! All titles are clickable links. Check out any you missed!

Another book read, another series I am waiting for the sequel too now!

I have supported and followed Linda for a long while now, taking part in her challenges on her blog and I read her novella All Good Stories with pleasure, so to see her full length book finally out there, I was excited to read it!

Here’s my review:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I started out reading this book, not knowing what to expect really, and after a few chapters I was hooked! Herman (the unfortunately named female main lead!) is leaving home to attempt to make a better life for her brother and her and somehow is led a different path by the meeting of a stranger on a train. Stephen Dagmaru is drawn to this stranger on the train, and invites her to become his assistant. He draws her into his life and family worries with an ulterior motive…

Gah! Why do I struggle so much to write something positive these days? To write something – anything – of my own volition? I swear, if it wasn’t for these prompts, I might not write at all for weeks on end. Which is strange, really, because when I start, it’s natural. It just goes. Before I go off on a tangent, I want to say thank you. To all of you who help me keep going with my prompts. Because though they may originate here, if it wasn’t for all of you reading and participating in them, I’d have no motivation to keep it up some weeks. Thank you. 🙂

I’m not going to get this posted on Saturday, but I’m happy I at least started it with a minute or two to spare. I’ve spent the day working and occasionally tending to my son Chris’s needs. And talking to my mother on the phone about half a dozen times, allaying her fears that there really is nothing to worry about when she finds a note in her room that she wrote about something she was trying to remember to do three years ago. I swear sometimes it would be best to go through her room when she’s not there and empty it of every scrap of paper once a week. She’s always been a worrier. Now she finds something to worry about and with her dementia, she can discover it for the first time ten times in the space of an hour.

I actually tried not giving birth to an only child, as I am, so that only one child would be stuck looking after me as I age. As it turns out, my eldest will likely be stuck with both me and his two disabled brothers. Life just isn’t fair.

Gah! Why do I struggle so much to write something positive these days? (Yes, I copied that.)

So I was at the hospital with Alex the other day, and I was amazed at how many people I recognized from when he was there for the first eight months of his life. Not only that, there were so many of those people who recognized me. I must have made an impression. Or Alex did. He was admitted for a night after vomiting as he came out of anaesthesia and they were afraid that he may have aspirated. He spent the night with the nurses at the desk, apparently, hanging out and flirting. He didn’t want to leave the hospital when it was time to go. I remember one time he was in ICU after having a second surgery in the space of two days. He’d had sleep apnea and the first surgery wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped. Even after all that, he managed to wrap every nurse in the ICU around his little finger. I’ve never seen so many nurses drop what they were doing (in the bloody ICU!) to wave goodbye to him as they wheeled him on a stretcher out the door and back up to the ward where he would spend another few days recovering.

He gets it from his dad, I’m sure. I’m simply not that charming.

But soon we won’t have that particular hospital to go to anymore. It’s a children’s hospital, and Alex will turn seventeen in five weeks. I fear the adult hospital may not be as good.

First, I’d like to give a special mention to our out-going Stream of Consciousness Saturday badge by Mr. John Holton. As it turned out, he has the distinct honour of coming in last-place this year, perfectly balancing out his spectacular win for the 2016-2017 badge. Thank you John, for providing us with a lovely design. Let’s everyone applaud John!

John Holton 2016-2017

It was a close race this year, with one badge pulling out in front during the final hours of yesterday’s voting. Let’s start with the runners-up.

Almost tied for fourth place were Ruth’s “Zoomburst Flower” and Scott’s “Rushing Stream.”

In third, we had Judy with her last-minute entry, “Sunrise.”

In second …

…

…

was JoAnna’s “Sparkly Stream,” which means our winner with 38% of the votes goes to J-Dubs with “A River with Red Flowers”!!

Congratulations to all the contestants on your amazing efforts. Thank you for making this years’ Stream of Consciousness Saturday badge contest a success!

It was a pretty tight race there for a while, but we have a clear winner for this year’s One-Liner Wednesday badge – no intervention by yours truly was needed.

Before I announce the winner, let’s take one more opportunity to appreciate the retiring badge by Wes. Wes’s badge served us well for over a year. With poignant quotes and a lovely backdrop, this wonderful badge will be missed.